You can ascribe panprotopsychism to Lenin - who saw the capacity of reflection as fundamental in manner - and that philosopher was the materialist to end all materialists. I believe Engels comes out with much the same stripes (Anti-Duhring)

Dennet - as a mechanical materialist - called materialism the quest to always find cranes building taller cranes. When you find something tall, a high level of organization, you look for how it was built up from below. This contrasts against religious / idealist thought - where a skyhook swoops in a gives you structure from the heavens, build by the ordained hand of God (Intelligent Design for example - very bad theory!)

I think we have sufficient evidence against miracles, FWIW.

Marx extends similar thinking to politics and economy - rather than derive society from ideas, one derives our ideas from our society - and the objective factors dominate over the subjective factors ("Social being determines Social Consciousness").

Albeit Marx is also a dialectics guy, as is Lenin and Engels obv -and this contrasts against my earlier accussation of Dennett as a mechanical materialist. (This FYI has very important results for how Dennett describes consciousness as illusory, versus how Marx&Co see biological evolution having developed the unique causal powers of consciousness, a result whivh cannot be reduced as a quantitative sum of its elements)

My take on being a materialist, is there is that which is unaware of its being, unconsciousness, comes before, and outnumbers, any conscious results - this blind essence swirls into causal nodes without planning, where reality then interacts with itself without planning - within this swirl, things fold into themselves, reality is condensed. And in this point of compression, ordered without⁶ a plan to have been orderly, reality may then engage in reflection - holistic management that rides nonconconscious chaos.

This is simply the next level of propagating being. It happens just the same in many places - much how hydrogen condensed to trillions of stars -, and so these protoconsciousness nodes, in a sense, are reduced to being considered nonconconscious once we raise our analysis up a level - and consider how yhe plurality of those nodes are now brought into unplanned and chaotic organization that each node fails to understand its place in.

But the same coalescing of order out of chaos repeats. From chaos, order again, and a qualitatively new level of analysis to consider. Atoms, to cells, cells, to animals, animals, to social packs, social packs, to modern civilization.

To restate: Out of chaos, order emerges, where the order is the manner in which the unconscious activity organizes to regular, holistic determination by the whole on the whole - conscious reflection. And that this is the building block of consciousness - enabling higher levels of activity to emerge - from the bottom working all the way to the top (and our thoughts).

>At this point, there is no concrete empirical evidence of consciousness

We have an interaction with reality. You are reading this now. We call this consciousness. This is sufficient evidence that something is occurring, with sufficient standardization - the evolution of brain states accords to discrete realizations of data, concentrated to a single experience, that enable our brain to engage global executive functions, problem solving, long term planning.

You can think! You exist! This is data!